Mongrel2 1.0 released.

http://sheddingbikes.com/posts/1283412933.html

by ryan-allen • 16 years ago

145 76 16 years ago

grrrrr2• 16 years ago

I have no doubt that for what it is this is a well designed piece of software, but, I'm gong to stick my neck out and say that purely for reasons of scalability a web server written in Ruby just doesn't seem like a sensible choice.

nanexcool• 16 years ago

I thought it was mainly C?

basil• 16 years ago

Mongrel2 isn't written in Ruby. It's written in C: http://mongrel2.org/doc/tip/docs/manual/book.wiki#x1-110002

grrrrr2• 16 years ago

In which case I am remiss, although at time if writing it says here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongrel_(web_server) "Mongrel is an open-source HTTP library and web server written in Ruby by Zed Shaw.".

chrismsnz• 16 years ago

Is this a quote from someone else?

Also, "does seem like a sensible choice"?

Apart from that, it's completely written in C and uses language-agnostic ZeroMQ to pass "requests" back to the handler than can be written in any language with a ZeroMQ library (pretty much all of them).

ErrantX2• 16 years ago

Twitter used to use Mongrel, but replaced it with Unicorn (uh, another Ruby based server :))

http://engineering.twitter.com/2010/03/unicorn-power.html

nailer3• 16 years ago

Well they're using Scala in production now, so if they wanted to use Mongrel2 messaging, they probably can.

kanwisher• 16 years ago

Unicorn is based on the mongrel source

risotto• 16 years ago

I saw a demo of Mongrel2, and it's really slick. Lots of new concepts to get behind, which is both scary and exciting.

There's no way I can use it for anything remotely close to production but I have some hobby ideas baking...

zedshaw10• 16 years ago

Thanks. Let me know what you do and shoot me bug reports on anything you find.

slashclee• 16 years ago

Congrats on the release, Zed!

zedshaw10• 16 years ago

Thanks man. Can't wait to get to the next level with it.

jallmann• 16 years ago

According to the Mongrel2 Book (http://mongrel2.org/doc/tip/docs/manual/book.wiki#x1-560005....), there is no pipelining of HTTP requests. Without testing anything for myself, I'm really surprised at this; are the perf gains from pipelining really as negligible as the book says they are?

points8• 16 years ago

That whole 'Note 8' sounds pretty stupid.

"In Mongrel2 we use a parser that rejects invalid requests from first basic principles using technology that's 30 years old and backed by solid mathematics."

The mind boggles... (Unless he's just being satirical here).

Personally, my advice to anyone thinking of using mongrel2 would be to write your own webserver. You'll learn far more than you ever dreamt. If a webserver isn't that important to your success/failure, use a battle-worn webserver - apache etc

lmz• 16 years ago

Well, it is true. He's validating it with a grammar, not some adhoc parser implementation.

thu• 16 years ago

Mongrel2 uses a Ragel-based parser (Zed already used that technique with the first Mongrel).

clyfe• 16 years ago

I have read many blog posts from Zed and seen some talks about using statistics evidence (R project) to measure performance (http://zedshaw.com/essays/programmer_stats.html). If he says they are negligible he probably measured them, and they probably are.

kqueue• 16 years ago

very few proxies support pipelining. You shouldn't be surprised at all. Try implementing pipelining in proxies and you'll figure that it isn't worth the effort.

zedshaw10• 16 years ago

There's no pipelining, there's keep-alives though. It turns out pipelining is really bad for servers that talk to backend applications because it allows clients to a large number of requests to be handled and then close the connection. The server could have then sent all the requests to backends or needs to buffer them. In that case, even though the client has closed the connection, the server(s) still need to process all the requests.

In fact, there's been discussions on the httpbis list to downplay or remove HTTP pipelining since it's ambiguous and causes performance headaches.

arnorhs• 16 years ago

Sweet stuff. Arnor's got a new toy! Good job Zed.

bnoordhuis2• 16 years ago

I've put up a GH repository of mongrel2 with its dependencies included. Compiling and installing should be as simple as typing:

  make all install PREFIX=$HOME/opt/mongrel2

http://github.com/bnoordhuis/mongrel2

nailer3• 16 years ago

First, thanks!

From your commit log:

> Disable target install-py for now, it requires sudo.

Agreed: re: disabling app that needs root unnecessarily. I don't want anything fucking with my OS python.

Have you considered having it simply call pip instead, so it installs to the current virtualenv?

bnoordhuis2• 16 years ago

I hadn't but I probably should have. Reading through the pip documentation as we speak - if you have some quick pointers, don't hesitate to post them.

zedshaw10• 16 years ago

We should revist this. It's mostly for convenience since lots of people just put the m2sh stuff wherever everything else goes. Problem is that screws up virtualenv folks.

Any ideas on it other than disabling?

aslakhellesoy• 16 years ago

How will Zed merge your changes back to his fossil repo, and how will you merge his changes back to git?

I'm not sure I understand the motivation for putting the code on github unless changes can flow both ways.

zedshaw10• 16 years ago

Actually there's already a few git mirrors I'll pull from if people tell me to. I then have a few branches from the fossil repo that have the git stuff in them. Works pretty easily actually.

But, I really should just follow this so I can get the changes as an email.

xiongchiamiov• 16 years ago

It'd be nice if someone wrote a fossil<->git bridge, since there are (multiple) foo<->git bridges for most other values of foo: https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Interfaces,_frontends,...

arturadib• 16 years ago

I've read the introduction and I still don't quite know what the fuss is all about.

Perhaps some examples of its benefits right in the introduction?

steveklabnik2• 16 years ago

First of all, there's a fuss because it's written by zedshaw. Secondly, zedshaw also authored mongrel, a well-known web server that many people have taken the ragel-based parser from to build their own stuff. Third, everyone's been talking about this whole 'sqlite as configuration' thing, which could be awesome or horrible, the jury's still out. Finally, it's always interesting to see new projects in 'solved' areas. How long has Apache been around? How well is it tested? It obviously works, but could it be better? Zed's trying out new ideas, has a crazy amount of test coverage, and is starting out fresh.

I haven't tried it yet. But it's certainly interesting.

jshen5• 16 years ago

what your'e saying is that there isn't yet a compelling reason for most people to try it.

zedshaw10• 16 years ago

Hmm, I'll think about that one too. Truth is, I just built it, so kind of a cobbler's shoes problem in that I've had little time to actually use it other than to run mongrel2.org with it. So far the people who are playing with it talk about how easy it is to work with and deploy one of the 10 programming language platforms using ZeroMQ.

emehrkay• 16 years ago

I am simply impressed at how much sh*t he gets done. I honestly want to be more like him

jshen5• 16 years ago

you should probably spend less time here ;)

SkyMarshal• 16 years ago

I actually think it's fine to spend time on HN, you just can't also spend tons of time on tons of other sites as well.

Based on anecdotal evidence only, it seems the rate at which articles move up and down the HN frontpage pretty much ensures you'll see everything that hits the front page per day if you check HN twice - once in the morning and once in the late afternoon or evening.

I don't think that's too much HN browsing to prevent you from being uber productive, as long as you're not also browsing tons of other sites on the net too.

ubercore2• 16 years ago

I'm missing the boat on how it's more language agnostic than other web servers (I'm most familiar with Apache)?

EDIT: I see now that it's "language agnostic" based on using ZeroMQ to shuttle request/responses between Mongrel2 and a language with a ZeroMQ library. Sounds cool, but also makes me wonder exactly how that's different from someone writing, say, mod_zeromq for Apache, and attaching handlers to ZeroMQ in the same way Mongrel2 does? Am I missing something?

alexgartrell2• 16 years ago

Mongrel2 specializes. This means way less cruft. It should also be much more performant in this role than Apache [citation needed], because Apache has sooooo much other stuff.

zedshaw10• 16 years ago

Apache's architecture is such that it's very bound to "files" and a strict request/response message pattern. That makes things like long polling, async sockets, and even streaming say ICY (check our mp3stream demo) really difficult.

In Mongrel2 it's kind of like every thing's long poll or an async socket. That let's you do a ton of very cool things you can't do easily in Apache or other web servers. Sure you could hack them in, but it's a nightmare.

ubercore2• 16 years ago

I think I get it, thanks. Mongrel2 is better at being language agnostic, by virtue of intentional design. Looking forward to trying it out!

michaelhalligan• 16 years ago

Good work Zed!

oomkiller• 16 years ago

So is this designed to replace apache/nginx, or should i throw it behind an nginx upstream still and let nginx serve the files?

there• 16 years ago

it can do either, but i think it's designed to do the former.

limist• 16 years ago

If you're not immediately grokking the significance of Mongrel2 (as I did not), be sure to check out the documentation's Introduction:

http://mongrel2.org/doc/tip/docs/manual/book.wiki#x1-40001

The features sound cool and significantly evolved past current webservers. And the documentation is extensive and so far, an enjoyable read - now that's impressive. :)

agazso• 16 years ago

I have an old idea regarding webservers: peer-to-peer file transfer. The server would not store the file on disk, only the last transferred block in memory. Rate control would be done at TCP level: while the block is not transferred by the receiver, the server would not read again from the sender.

I have written several HTTP servers myself, and I know it's doable, but the world does not need another webserver that only has this distinguishing feature.

My question is if all of this can be done with Mongrel2?

deweller• 16 years ago

I believe the potential of Mongrel2 lies in real-time web applications.

Want to write a backend in PHP for a real-time chat? That is very difficult with Apache and mod_php. With Mongrel2 and ZeroMQ, it is almost trivial.

Mongrel2's asynchronous pub/sub networking paradigm opens up possibilities for real-time communication to browsers. When websockets get real, Mongrel2 may very well be the way we all start using them.

Where Mongrel2 has some ground to cover is handling traditional server-generated pages. Want to run an existing PHP application with a framework like CodeIgniter? You can't do it from Mongrel2 without proxying to nginx or apache (yet). Hopefully this is something that will come along in Mongrel2 v2.0.

Mongrel2 1.0 released.

Related Stories